Looking at descriptions of various motherboards for sale, I am not
familiar with most of the terms (including good or bad manufacturers).

Is there a FAQ or tutor to help buying a new motherboard?

I'm not looking for gaming or server boards. Just a good quality
home application board.

Thanks for any help.

Jack

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On Fri, 18 May 2007 15:26:51 -0400, J. Yazel <jyazel (AT) ds (DOT) net>
wrote:


Motherboards are far too broad a topic for such a tutorial.
Based on your needs, select among contemporary offerings
with the features you require and the price you can bear -
keeping in mind that a certain quality level is often
prudent instead of trying to save $ on a lesser quality
board. Some of the more popular manufacturers that have
turned out quality boards over the years are MSI, Gigabyte,
Asus, Abit. That is no guarantee you wouldn't run into an
occasional bug of some sort from any of these.

It might be better to start out with specifics, particular
information categorized to narrow the topic a bit. Where
are you hesitating in the selection process? Often one
considers their most demanding or most common applications
and seeks benchmarks of the CPU which performs well at them
within the budget. Next one seeks a compatible motherboard,
keeping in mind any parts they might want to reuse with the
new system in case there might be compatibility issues.

For example whether you want a floppy drive or more than 2
IDE/PATA drives. Whether you have AGP or PCI Express video
card to reuse. Whether you "need" to reuse a lot of DDR1
memory to save some money or are buying DDR2 now. Whether
you had multiple PCI cards you needed to add, if such
featurse aren't integrated on a motherboard there might not
even be a PCI Express equivalent yet and some motherboards
have fewer PCI slots than others, and some of those slots
might be blocked if the video card has a large heatsink or
you wish to aid in video card cooling by leaving the
adjacent slot empty.

Thanks for the suggestions.

However, I'm familiar with most of them.

What I'm referring to is, for example:

SLI AM2 Nforce 680i 775 mATX uATX mATX ViiV 650i
socket 939

These appear in the title description of motherboards.

Jack

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J. Yazel wrote:
To use Wikipedia, go to the main page www.wikipedia.org
and search there. The search engine on that main page
works best.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface (see also ATI_Crossfire)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_AM2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nforce

http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce_600i_tech_specs.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_775
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microatx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viiv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_939

So far, I can find definitions on www.wikipedia.org for
a lot of them. When discussing chipsets, a visit to
Intel, Nvidia, AMD/ATI, SIS, or VIA websites can
present tables that compare recent chipsets for their
features. Wikipedia also has tables, and while I didn't
run into it, I think there is also an article or two
comparing processor families.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_microprocessors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium (list at bottom of page)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon (list at bottom of page)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64_X2

Specific data is also available here:

http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/desktop/
http://processorfinder.intel.com

Paul

On Sat, 19 May 2007 03:57:08 -0400, Paul <nospam (AT) needed (DOT) com> wrote:

Whew!!

Very good.

I'll try out the links.

Thanks very much.

Jack

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On May 18, 12:26 pm, J. Yazel <jya... (AT) ds (DOT) net> wrote:

Manufacturer's to avoid:

ECS (elitegroup)
Biostar
Trigem


Good manufacturers:

Intel
MSI (usually)
Asus (usually)

I'll keep those in mind.

Thanks.

Jack

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On May 18, 8:26 pm, J. Yazel <jya... (AT) ds (DOT) net> wrote:
I wish people replying would do a requirements analysis, it is not
good for people wanting to learn about anything. I'm glad you didn't
provide specifics yet..

I recall when I had the same problem.

Regarding quality, that's easy, you just have to know the good makes.
MSI, Abit, Asus,


I found a site with lots of motherboards.. maybe newegg,. You want
them organised in such a way that you see a pattern. e.g. be able to
click on Socket A, and see all socket A MBRDs. I went by SOCKET or
processor.. So, going back in time a bit, Socket A MBRDs were for
the AMD Athlon XP processor. (I had easily found that the AMD Athlon
XP was socket A)

You look at what socket your processor is, and then you see the MBRDs
that support it, you see how much RAM They take, and what RAM they
take.

You can find the right board just by that.

You may find that there are different configurations with , say,
Socket blah MBRDs. I can't recall differences at the moment.. But
there can be, though all support that processor. You realise that the
thing that makes the big difference, is the ** CHIPSET **

Chipset is a very useful general category.. By choosing a chipset, you
then narrow down quite finely what Socket blah MBRD you want, you
start to understand why one Socket blah MBRD has one configuration and
another has another configuration (Different chipsets).

Processors are very important to know about.. P4s and AMD Athlon XPs
relied on an FSB.. You can read explanations of that on overclocking
sites.. (even if you choose not to do any overclocking. You may even
choose to underclock just to test the concept). But those guys like to
make sure they understand what they're doing 'cos overclocking is
possibly or potentially a dangerous thing. And what they're doing
overlaps this concept.
The FSB is a bus on the motherboard. The concept overlaps with knowing
about processors , processor multipliers, knowing WHY the MBRD
supports the speed of processor that it says it does. There's also the
*memory bus*. Whose speed can be set, and that relates to the RAM
speed you buy.. Get the max supported by the MBRD.
CPU-(FSB)--Northbridge-(Memory Bus)--RAM

The Athlon 64, doesn't use an FSB and Memory Bus. It has one Bus or
set of busses, called Hypertransport, connecting CPU and RAM
directly. (I may be a bit wrong there..)

I think that's just enough architecture one has to know about to read
the specification of a MBRD..

As you can see, I did it a long while ago!!


Alot of understanding MBRDs or Processors, is reading specifications,
understanding what is meant.. With processors or MBRDs, it's good to
undertand what people mean when talking of installing them too..
Processors there seems to be some terminology.. I'm not that up on it
myself, but i'm getting there.. my understanding is..

People talk of spreading paste on the core or as some say, spreading
it on the die.. What do they mean..

Now i'll really ramble
Regarding processors.. I know a little of the FE (fetch execute )
cycle.. I have a computing A level background from many years ago.. A
book by heathcote published by Letts, mentioned CPU as consisting of
ALU+CU . Somewhere online I found that Core was ALU+CU..
That's where the FE cycle takes place. Nowadays processors can have
many cores.

An electronic engineering book I ha ve somewhere, maybe called
"digital systems design" , I didn't read much of it but in the
beginning it defines Dice. I can't remember the definition.. The
plural is Dices. Not die. It's to do with the chip. So there's one
dice, many cores.
I guess maybe in the old days of the Athlon XP people said you spread
paste on the Core or Die or perhaps more correctly than die- Dice.

But the P4(same era as the Athlon xp), and perhaps processors since
then, now have an IHS(integrated heat spreader).. Covering the core,
or nowadays, cores. And you spread the paste on that..
--
At the moment, or at least a month ago, people said that the Athlon 64
X2 was a good deal. That's a processor. But that knowledge will help
you find whatever MBRD and processor and RAM you want.. Just look for
MBRDs for the Athlon 64 X2, see what they support. The Athlon 64 X2
3800+ was cheap on newegg, may still be. Or maybe a faster one is
cheaper now

On 20 May 2007 04:11:34 -0700, "jameshanley39 (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.uk"
<jameshanley39 (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

<snip>

err, meant "wouldn't"
now makes sense.
<snip>

Thanks very much for the suggestions.

Every little bit helps.

Jack

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